I'll be honest, I enjoy as much competition as possible because in the end it benefits us, the consumers. However, as it was mentioned, what EA may be doing is to try and get a monopoly on their digital end of their own games on the PC. That, I fear, will not benefit anyone since EA will be able to put the prices they want, make any discount if and when they want and so on.

It is a competition for the PC market share so there is indeed a war to try and get as many people to use EA's service as possible, but EA is creating a mini-monopoly of their own games. What will happen? Well, IMO I think that BF3 is their trump card and will make a lot of people use that service because otherwise they cannot play BF3 but this may end backfiring on them, the reason being that those who would purchase the odd EA title to see what it was like when they were in the digital platform of choice of the gamers now won't purchase it because they couldn't be bothered to install yet another digital platform for a game that, if we follow EA's track record, is average at best.

If it wasn't for BF3 coming soon and this project would pretty much have the opposite effects desired by EA. And it will probably have those opposite effects in the long run. Nobody likes monopolies, nobody likes to choose yet another platform to install and nobody likes to be forced to install said platform just to play a handful of games. This is also something that D2D and Gamersgate has an advantage over Steam and Origins, on those you can simply download the file and that's it, no platform installation required.

EA is aiming its gun at its own foot with this, whether they shoot it remains to be seen.